


First

by AnnaofAza



Category: Check Please! (Webcomic)
Genre: Fourth of July, Kissing, M/M, Serious Discussions
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-18
Updated: 2016-04-18
Packaged: 2018-06-03 00:16:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,306
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6589069
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AnnaofAza/pseuds/AnnaofAza
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Lord, yes,” Bitty exclaims, still keeping his voice hushed, “and they say your first kiss is overrated.”</p><p>Jack then pauses. “Wait. Was…that your first kiss? Ever?”</p><p>While Jack is Bitty's first kiss, Bitty isn't Jack's.</p>
            </blockquote>





	First

**Author's Note:**

> Posted on [my tumblr!](http://annaofaza.tumblr.com/post/143304819643/first)

Bitty can’t sleep.

It’s like the night of graduation, simply looking at the out of the window of the plane going back home and replaying the whole thing over and over: Jack running in, hair disheveled and calling his name; Bitty trying to wipe his eyes and to take his earbuds out and to stop babbling so much; Jack suddenly bending down _, kissing him_ , hands moving to cup his cheek and the lower part of his back; both of them simply standing there in the mostly-packed bedroom without moving to take a breath _._

These three days—especially tonight—had been perfect. If only he could bottle it all up and take a sip of it the rest of the summer, the days when their lives begin separately, the nights when both of them are too exhausted or busy to call.

But it doesn’t matter, not now.

What matters is that Jack is here, all six feet and one inch of him, with his large hands and blue eyes and mussed dark hair. Here with _him._ Who could have imagined that Mr. Hockey Robot “Eat Your Protein” Zimmermann would have come down all the way to see him? And say—

The floorboard outside the door creaks, and Bitty tries to ignore it. But instead of walking further towards the bathroom, footsteps pause right in front of his partly-cracked door.

He sits up.

Jack, in the hallway, mouths _never mind,_ _go back to sleep_ with an apologetic smile, but Bitty shakes his head and gestures for him to open the door. He does, moving into the threshold, one foot in the room.

“Hey,” Jack breathes.

“Hey, yourself,” Bitty whispers, shifting in his bed. Part of him is screaming that his parents are down the hall, that they could get caught, that he might not have a good explanation about his proclaimed _friend and former teammate_ in his room. But the memory of Jack’s arm around his shoulder, his hand resting on his chest, along with the giddy, heart-skipping warmth in his body that had nothing to do with the Georgia weather, encourages Bitty to throw open his covers. “Come on in.”

Jack slips in beside him, both of them wincing when the bed creaks underneath the added weight, but Bitty throws the covers over their heads.

They kiss again, slow and sweet and soft. Jack tastes like the apple pie they split in the back of the truck, eating with plastic forks, while watching the fireworks. Bitty remembers the first burst of sparks that split across the sky, then with the bursts of red and white and blue, Jack’s lips on his and hands roving over his back. Bitty’s heart had jumped every time a firework went off, his fingers clenching tighter into the fabric of Jack’s red plaid flannel and lips pressing harder, quicker, sloppier with every moment in the bed of the truck. Only the stars watched them, and they were miles away from his house, so he thought of nothing besides tucking his hands inside the back pockets of Jack’s jeans and pulling him closer to his body.

 _This_ kiss is measured, almost tentative, underneath the tent of a thin quilt. Jack’s hands stay pressed up against Bitty’s back, and Bitty’s arms wind around his neck, but their lips move, making sparks sputter in his stomach and heartbeat skip like a rabbit’s. It’s not _passionate,_ exactly, but still has an undercurrent of the tenderness and desperation of their first kiss.

“Lord a’mercy,” Bitty murmurs, when they pull away at last, “we don’t need Fourth of July to have fireworks, huh?”

Jack groans softly, “ _Stop_ ,” and flips up the covers. To Bitty’s amusement, his cheeks are flushed like his Moo Maw’s famous raspberry tarts. “It was good for you, though?”

“Oh, honey, don’t go fishing for compliments now.” But Bitty does sigh, mock-dreamily. “But I will admit my heart’s gone all a’flutter.”

Jack smirks, pressing their foreheads together, and Bitty realizes that Jack is leaning over him, legs spread over his thighs. “Was that the best one?”

“Nah,” Bitty immediately says. “The best one was graduation, hands down.”

Jack’s smile is soft. “Mine, too. Our first kiss.”

“Lord, yes,” Bitty exclaims, still keeping his voice hushed, “and they say your first kiss is overrated.”

Jack then pauses. “Wait. Was…that your first kiss? Ever?”

“Well, it’s not like there were many opportunities here _,”_ Bitty says, a bit sourly. He loves Georgia, but _honestly_. “And I just…was never that interested in anyone at Samwell.”

“What about that rugby player? The one you took to Winter Screw?”

“Him?” Bitty asks, a bit startled. “Oh, no, it was…we met a few times afterward, but we didn’t have a whole lot in common, except for the fact that we had foreign accents. And were…uh, you know.” He turns to bury his face in his pillow. “Ugh, I can’t say it here.”

Jack gets off of him, rolling over so he’s on his side, elbow bent on the mattress and palm cradling his cheek to keep his neck up. His next words are almost apologetic: “So, your first kiss was…with me?”

“Jack Laurent Zimmermann,” Bitty scolds, “I wouldn’t have it any other way.”

“I’m just saying. I—I just—I didn’t know.”

Bitty frowns uncertainly, beginning to sit up. “Is this going to be a problem?”

“What? No!” Jack exclaims, clear surprise in his voice. “I’ve had four years of Shitty’s lectures about the warped concept of virginity in patriarchal and allosexual society. I wouldn’t—I don’t think anything less of you.”

“Good.” Bitty then ventures, “So, I—I’m assuming I wasn’t your first kiss.”

“No,” Jack says slowly, slowly moving to stroke his fingers on the inside of Bitty’s arm, “but I wish you had been.”

Bitty feels his face heat up in the darkness. “That bad?” he asks, half-jokingly.

“I…” Jack then takes his hand off of Bitty’s arm, expression suddenly serious in a way Bitty’s used to seeing before games—and he realizes that Jack won’t be going to any more Samwell games, unless he was in the stands. The thought made Bitty’s heart twist in his chest. “Do you really want to know? I’ll tell you, if you want, but you…you have to hold off the questions until the end, okay?”

Nodding slowly, Bitty answers, “I admit I’m curious, but if you’re not ready to tell me, then you don’t—“

“No,” Jack interrupts, taking Bitty’s hand in his and squeezing. “No, I want to. And there are….things I should tell you before I come out to the public.”

Bitty nods. He and Jack had discussed this before Jack had come down to Georgia. They’d mutually agreed for Jack to introduce himself as Bitty’s “famous friend,” and, although they didn’t plan to make their relationship public just yet, they definitely would in the future. _I don’t want to hide how important you are to me,_ Jack had said, and Bitty could only wordlessly nod back, touching his fingers lightly to Jack’s face on his laptop screen.

Jack now takes a deep breath, his grip tightening ever-so-slightly on Bitty’s hand.

“When I was sixteen, I joined the junior league, and I was…” Jack pauses. “Stressed. I loved hockey, but it was so different from when I was just… _playing,_ you know, when I was younger. There was always…my dad, but…I began to realize that, after those games, when someone would come up to me and start asking me all these questions about contracts and how I would like this certain place and how they’d even approached my other teammates that my life was going to change. Drastically.”

Bitty nods, placing his hand on Jack’s shoulder.

“I started taking pills to help me with the…” Jack hesitates, then nearly whispers, “anxiety,” like it’s being pulled out of him. “I should have been on top of the world, but I felt like my feet were stuck to the ground. I told myself that I’d stop, eventually, but…as you know, I didn’t.” _Until it was almost too_ late is implied.

Bitty squeezes Jack’s shoulder. He wishes, somehow, that he could have helped in some way, but Bitty had just been a scared little boy in Georgia, all but begging his parents to change schools and trying to crush down the light, fluttery feeling in his chest whenever he looked at Garth Pearson. He hadn’t even began to play hockey then, let alone know what _Zimmermann_ was going to mean to him.

Jack doesn’t look at him when he says, “But one good thing about that time of my life was because…I met Kent.”

 _Kent._ With that sharp, one-syllable name, he feels as helpless as he did back at the Haus, standing in front of the closed door and hearing muffled gasps and footsteps going down the stairs.

Bitty doesn’t take his hand away, but the skin underneath his fingertips is the only thing he can feel. He can only watch as Jack’s lips move, eyes looking at some random corner of the ceiling.

“Kent was everything I wanted to be—what I _should_ have been, I guess. He was a natural at hockey and didn’t care what people thought of him. We would get together after practice and get something to go from one of the restaurants nearby and eat it at one of our houses. Mostly mine, because Kent was always fighting with his father. And I resented mine—I don’t _now_ , but at the time, my father’s legacy crushed me. I couldn’t _breathe_ , but Kent—he helped a lot. He seemed to take it away, just for a few hours, and I could ride the rest of the day on that high. Most of the time.

“And one day, he was teasing me, and I was teasing him back, and—it just happened.” Jack briefly shifts, and Bitty realizes that they’re still holding hands. “We were young and maybe a bit scared, too, but the thought of finally meeting someone like… _us_ was a factor, yes, but…”

Bitty waits. He knows what comes next, and it’s strange—but silly, of course, because Jack obviously liked people before Bitty. Heck, Bitty himself had liked a few boys before fixating on Jack at Samwell. It shouldn’t matter who Jack’s first was, but Jack had been _Bitty’s_ first.

He’d assumed that Jack had been with people, but having actually _met_ a specific person makes him uneasy, especially since every good opinion Bitty had of Parse had gone down the drain with _You’re scared that everyone’s going to find out you’re worthless, right? Oh, don’t worry, just give it a few seasons, Jack. Trust me._

Jack doesn’t finish whatever he was going to say, but instead rushes right through towards the end: “We fought a lot. He knew I was taking pills and wanted me to stop, but he didn’t know how much I was taking and didn’t exactly understand _why_ I was taking them. He told me to fuck my dad, fuck everything, and just _play._ He said I needed to quit, and I told him I couldn’t and we kept fighting and partying with our team when we weren’t fighting and…you know the rest.”

Bitty lays his head on Jack’s chest. “Oh, _honey_ ,” he breathes.

Jack’s next breath is shuddery, and his hands begin tremble. “He tried to visit me, once, before he got drafted by the Aces, but I turned him away. After that, we just…we can’t be like we were before.”

“Before? Did…” Bitty wants to ask _did you love him,_ but that seems too big for this small room, and he’s not entirely sure he wants to know. “Do you think he still…feels the same way?”

“Kent?” Jack murmurs, but definitively shakes his head. “I…I didn’t like him platonically, but we never really said anything would tip off the public about us, even in private.” He sighs. “I don’t know now. He says he misses me, but…like I said, nothing is the same between us.”

Bitty remembers the videos he’d watched after that night in some of sick self-flagellation after cleaning the entire kitchen: Jack laughing, hair longer, with Parse’s arm around his shoulder. Both of them were wearing blue-and-white jerseys. There was shouting in the background, along with cameras flashing and clicking, and everyone in the background was wearing coats and scarves. Someone waved a microphone beneath their faces.

“Another win for the Parson and Zimmermann duo! How do you feel?” a reporter asked, and Parse had immediately laughed—“On top of the fucking world”—while Jack wordlessly grinned down at Parse. In that moment, he seemed _untouchable_ —

But now, looking at Jack’s face and feeling the hand now move up and down his arm, Bitty knows this Jack is different. He’s not less, no matter what some idiot analyst says about _Bob Zimmermann Lite,_ and the way Jack’s been looking at him all day—and all night—with soft, tender smiles and secret, furtive touches doesn’t compare to those videos from years and years before.

In the dark, sweltering room, Jack pulls him closer, voice anxious. “Does it bother you? Should I not have—“

“No,” Bitty breathes, and kisses him, both gentle and deliberate. “No, it doesn’t.”

They hold each other, Bitty’s head tucked underneath Jack’s chin, Jack’s hands steady on his back. Bitty knows Jack will be gone in the morning, behind a closed door in the guest room, as if he’d been sleeping there the whole time. He knows that’s the way it has to be. They’ll have to be careful, but they’re going to go through it all _together_.

And he’s ready.

Just as Bitty’s eyes begin to close, he hears this:

“But you’re my first, Bits. In everything.”

**Author's Note:**

> I wonder how and if Jack and Bitty had a serious conversation about Parse because it is clear with the latest updates that Bitty still isn't exactly a fan. Hopefully, we'll see, and most likely with Parse striding into the room at the worst possible time and going, "Hi, I'm here to ruin everything." 
> 
> (My feelings on him are so complicated, y'all.)


End file.
